In a hallway conversation at a recent conference, David Weinberger interviews Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab. There, the topic is search.

Here, the topic is blogging.

Blogging may be more democratic, but it's also likely to be less read. There is a point when there are simply too many blogs.

David Weinberger announced on National Public Radio that he would no longer be reading many of his friends' blogs. Who has the time?

"A salad bar that is five miles long is as useless to me as one that is 3,000 miles long because I am getting all the salad I can eat in the first 15 feet," Weinberger said.

This calls for a Simpsons reference:

Homer: Look kids! I just got my party invitiations back from the printers.
Lisa: [Reading the invitation.] "Come to Homer's BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB."
Bart: What's that extra B for?
Homer: It's a typo.
Lisa: Dad! Can't you have some other type of party, one where you don't serve meat?
Homer: All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say 'Yo Goober! Where's the meat!?'. I'm trying to impress people here Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.

Audio here. (Also, it feels good to know I'm not the only one.)

Weinberger also has a new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, due out in May. He gets blurbs from all the right digerati authors: Anderson, Dyson, Johnson, Wales. Publishers Weekly found the book full of "intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams." The obligatory book-blog should give you a sense. The abundance of meaning and The abundance of worthiness and the new relevancy both seem to sync nicely with my recent investigations.

Scaling Down

Slides from the NSF PI Conference on the Science of Design, [2, 3], held March 1, 2007, in Alexandria, VA.

This connects to the recent Economist article on innovation, and how Vannevar Bush's ideas about innovation have run their course, and are now being supplanted.

Later this week, Humboldt State University is hosting a SoD symposium; the keynote speaker is Nigel Cross, author of Designerly Ways of Knowing. (See this paper for a sample.) In September, he'll be hosting DTRS7: Design Meeting Protocols, which looks at the design process and how it can be better understood and thus improved.

Steps Toward a Science of Design

Conference Keynote by Carliss Y. Baldwin of HBS.

Behind every innovation lies a new design. Large or complex designs, involving many people, require architectures that create a sensible subdivision of the design tasks.

Design architectures (and the systems built from them) may be "manageable" or "unmanageable." By manageable, I mean that the artifacts created within the architecture will stay within the boundaries of a single enterprise (or a supply chain controlled by a dominant firm). Windows and Office are manageable architectures by this definition, whereas Apache and Linux are coordinated but not manageable. "Manageable" architectures give rise to product lines and product families, while "unmanageable" architectures give rise to modular clusters and open source communities.

There are important technical properties of a design architecture that affect its manageability. In this speech, I will talk about how designs draw resources from the economy, and what technical properties make an architecture "manageable" or "unmanageable." These properties, I will argue, are not good or bad in themselves, but they affect economic incentives and patterns of competition over new products and designs. Thus design architecture is an important consideration in formulating a sound product line strategy.

Slides are available.

Unmanageable Design Architectures: What They Are and Their Financial Consequences

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.
--V.S. Naipaul

Compare with the Louis Kahn quote from yesterday.

The long way round | V.S. Naipaul

Are you in it to win? Would you regard civil rights as the gift that keeps on giving? Do you believe in the American Dream, stupid?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you might consider supporting Hillary Clinton, the person to send to the White House when you care enough to send the very best. More than any other candidate, Clinton has brought the sensibility of Hallmark greeting cards to the 2008 presidential race.

Nothing like a little empty populism to get the donations rolling in.

On the Senate floor, Clinton's observations have been sharp and trenchant, but it is on the campaign trail where Clinton's language really soars.

"When the injured soldiers return home," she told the crowd of 200, "they should be greeted with open arms, not a wall of bureaucratic red tape." If there was dissent in the room, it was not audible. "Our soldiers are facing some very difficult challenges," she allowed, but she vowed to "put in place a system to get everybody to the front of the line."

Don't understand the logistics of getting everybody to the front of the line? It's the American Dream, stupid.

Candidate Clinton, Embracing the Trite and the True

5. How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page?

This URL is not loading at the present time, but you can read it in the Google cache.

Then think of poor Douglas Rushkoff.

Being Human: 10 Questions about the future of the humanities in America

This is the company/person that Cringely's article is about.

Basically, they're talking about taking YouTube peer-to-peer and monetizing it.

Neokast is a live video streaming platform for video distribution over the Internet. The video files available through Neokast are both user-generated and solicited from professional film makers by Neokast Productions LLC. Users can upload live video streams from any video capture device, and they can also upload prerecorded (archived) video content from their computer. Content publishers can choose to make their content available on their own website, on the Neokast website, or both. Live video streams and archived videos can be viewed as they are uploaded, in real-time, by any number of viewers through any normal DSL or cable Internet connection. Content publishers have the option of offering their content as free live streams, free archived streams, On-Demand, and Pay-Per-View. Users have the option to charge admission to their content and to participate in the sharing of advertising revenue generated by their content. There is no limit to the video length. The videos can be viewed in HD quality, depending on the capabilities of the content publisher and viewer. Due to advanced streaming protocols within the Neokast technology, the cost of providing the Neokast service is far lower than any other video distribution service in existence.

Cringely's hype makes for strong contrast with Bruce Sterling's Rant at SXSW.

By expanding its scope and enhancing its capabilities, Neokast’s patent pending technology has the potential to revolutionize the market in global communications. As the world moves further towards globalization, it has become increasingly desirable from a social, political, and economical standpoint that the ability to transmit and receive information is not bounded by region, and that it does not belong solely to media conglomerates and political networks. With Neokast providing the ability to stream events in real time, anyone can be a field reporter, every band can reach a global audience, every sporting event can be viewed from anywhere in the world, and everyone can have a forum in which to be heard. But the possibilities do not end there. With the expansion of Wi-Fi networks, the growing availability of high-speed internet access, and the integration of computers with television, Neokast offers viewers a portal through which they can continuously view the most interesting and significant world events.

In retrospect it was so obvious -- !! -- that the worldwide shortage of field reporters was due to the lack of a viable P2P video distribution system. Why didn't someone fix this before now?

On Cringely's blog, the CEO responds to critics, talking about the illegality of rival services. Well, then, who is he kidding about "every sporting event can be viewed from anywhere in the world"? For most professional events, video distribution rights are exclusively negotiated and highly valued. This doesn't add up.

Neokast

Bob Cringely joins the chorus of people who don't get it. But at least he doesn't get it in a different way.

With Cisco it always comes down to routers and how to get people to buy new ones. That's evident in Cisco's purchase this week of WebEx, where we can expect Cisco to strongly push video services on those two million WebEx customers, straining the system and forcing hardware upgrades. It's not about Microsoft; it's about the routers.

Bob's analysis of the economics of multicast is, well, ... let's just say I'd recommend Kevin Almeroth's analysis instead.

The $7 TV Network | Bob Cringely

Life is short for a meme, it seems, and unpredictable, to boot.

Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.

However, also unlike mammals -- and in fact most higher organisms -- a meme reaches reproductive age only moments after its birth. If it only manages to find its way to a target-rich environment, growth opportunities abound.

Yet even the most successful families of memes can go from pauperdom to dynasty to death to dust, all in the span of a few days.

Fortunately, here at MemeStreams, they don't bury or incinerate our beloved memes of yore. Instead, the crack team of scientists at the Industrial Memetics Institute has developed a highly advanced cryopreservation service. Unlike similar services for humans and other mammals, the service provided by MemeStreams is active today. It allows you -- in fact, anyone -- to reanimate a suspended meme of your choosing, and then to deposit it in the memetic meat market that is your blog.

Sadly, I have found that most MemeStreams users only rarely -- if ever -- avail themselves of the benefits of these remarkable cryorestoration services. As an independent profit center with no annual allocation from the IMI budget, the cryo unit is perpetually at risk of closure. For months now, the unit has been unable to hire staff to replace three of its senior technicians lost to headhunters in Q4FY06.

As part of the upcoming "Reanimemer" promotional campaign aimed at a Q3FY07 turn-around for the ailing cryo unit, I have scoured their voluminous records to provide you with a small sampling of what is presently on offer. I encourage you to plan your own visit soon.

Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised (now, archived here by wayback, and here)

Terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists. (now at YouTube) -- This video still amazes me.

A business model for MemeStreams

Neurodiversity Forever

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The latest debate in P2P and overlay multicast systems is whether or not to build trees. The main argument on the anti-tree side is that tree construction is complex, and that trees are fragile. The main counterargument is that non-tree systems have a lot of overhead. In this paper, we argue that you can have it both ways: that one can build multi-tree systems with simple and scalable algorithms, and can still yield fast convergence and robustness.

This paper presents Chunkyspread, a multi-tree, heterogeneous P2P multicast algorithm based on an unstructured overlay. Through simulation, we show that Chunkyspread can control load to within a few percent of a heterogeneous target load, and how this can be traded off for improvements in latency and tit-for-tat incentives.

Slides from a talk are also available.

Chunkyspread: Multi-tree Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Multicast [PDF]